... Last month, 45 U.S. food-processing groups, representing firms whose raw material costs have gone through the roof, demanded that the U.S. agriculture secretary release farmers from their contractual obligation to maintain a portion of their land for wildlife preservation. The U.S. baking industry's trade association, representing firms such as Kellogg Co., Sara Lee Corp. and Interstate Bakeries Corp., plans a march on Washington by the firms' employees later this month to press for a reduction in U.S. wheat exports. ...
Brilliant. Let's further degrade our declining natural resources to compensate for a crop growth pattern that degrades our natural resources. And by 'natural resources', I mean the human species' life support system.
What's plain to any reasonable observer is that conservation programs, which already tend to enroll marginal and previously degraded land, aren't the problem with declining wheat availability. In addition to the export concern (an issue because a lot of other countries are closing off exports after a bad world harvest generated a bumper crop of buyers,) this is:
... The milling industry has been resistant to using such genetically modified wheats, so wheat plants have to be improved the old-fashioned way, by laboriously selecting those with the desired qualities in test plots. That is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Even then, there is no assurance that farmers will buy the seed year after year. That is because of the nature of the wheat plant, an unusually complex organism originating in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Unlike hybrid corn, which loses its productivity after the first year, seeds from improved wheat varieties can be saved and replanted for several years without significant loss of yield.
Syngenta, a large seed company, is still working to develop improved wheat, but Rob Bruns, who heads the North American cereal seed operation, acknowledged that it's difficult to create "enough critical mass to pay for the higher tech investments."
The upshot is that most wheat research is now consigned to public colleges with limited amounts of federal and state funds. ...
Human beings have been adapting plants and animals to our needs for millenia. We're really good at it by now, when we put our minds to it. But the environment is not a blank slate onto which we add crop organisms; competition from pests, weeds and disease never stops.
Farmers used to save their own seed and do the kind of breed tinkering that now gets done mostly in corporate or university research plots. Though as you read above, that activity is mostly centralized in the hands of a few companies who may not bother with it for all grains, and often adapt varieties more to brands of chemicals than to local growing conditions.
Even the editors of The Economist, who've clearly all got certificates from the Condoleezza Rice School of How Could We Ever Have Known, were compelled to let the following truth slip onto the 34th page of their April 19th-25th, 2008, issue, in an article entitled, "The new face of hunger." Emphasis mine:
... Most agricultural research in developing countries is financed by governments. In the 1980s, governments started to reduce green-revolutionary spending, either out of complacency (believing the problem of food had been licked), or because they preferred to involve the private sector. But many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists. And in the 1980s and 1990s huge farm surpluses from the rich world were being dumped on markets, depressing prices and returns on investment. Spending on farming as a share of total public spending in developing countries fell by half between 1980 and 2004. ...
Private firms acting like ... rent-seeking monopolists! Holy kinderscheissefliegen, Batman, say it ain't so!
And do they note that rent-seeking monopolists controlled the government policy in the rich world that led to that dumping? That private capitalist entities, the sort of ideal groups to whom their neoliberal ilk think countries should be encouraged to sell off state functions, are in the habit of manipulating whole worldwide supply chains establish monopolies and extract profits that make the whole system creak and groan? They do not. No, they go right back, on the same page even, to fantasizing about what wonders a total lack of cautionary market restraint might bring about:
... And if European countries relax their hostility to genetically modified organisms, crop scientists could do things -- such as redesigning photosynthesis in plants -- which could boost yields 50% or more. ...
Frak me! The mere hostility of the EU is what prevents scientists (even in the notoriously lax US) from redesigning a process they don't yet completely understand in order to alter the metabolism of crop plants in a way that would leave farmers all over the world begging for that seed? I'm going to get started drinking early today. Where's that hard cider?
Generally, when you significantly boost metabolic devotion to one process, presuming that's possible for the sake of argument, others are sacrificed and sometimes unpredictably. Does pest resistance go entirely? Drought hardiness? How's your root metabolism doing there? Does its fertilizer and nutrient needs correspondingly double, doubling the up front cost of growing it and the stress on the soil? And hey, what kind of weird, wild arse proteins are you putting in that thing, anyway?
In this, The Economist exemplifies the lazy, corporate technocratic attitude. SCIENCE(TM) will come along and absolve their incompetent, wasteful, selfish, greedy behinds of the consequences of their actions, with no changes necessary as a nod to good sense.
For example, it might absolve them of recklessly destroying the culture and knowledge of seed saving by small farmers, which had long produced a patchwork of crop plants that even in bad years would rarely all fail at the same time. And in spite of the carnage this stranglehold on useful crop organisms combined with control of the markets that determine which crops are salable, the Bush administration enshrined laws against seed saving in Iraq's legal code. A favor for their good friends at Monsanto.
And that's why, coming back to it, we have a wheat problem. Because there are too many countries with very little option other than to buy our wheat, courtesy of the corporatist policies pushed by transnational agribusiness and First World governments that insist on bankrupting poor farmers with no other means to make a living, all over the world.
I'm not holding my breath for that protest, though.
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